


negative 00 ghost 27

by gravy_tape



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Headcanon, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Original Character(s), POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 21:53:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16900503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gravy_tape/pseuds/gravy_tape
Summary: You are ephemeral by design. And, you suppose, so is time. You were not meant to be known.





	negative 00 ghost 27

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in the months following the release of TWS and before the release of Civil War and has been firmly and forgotten in my drive ever since. It seemed time I just post the thing.
> 
> I think for a lot of us there was a lot of promise in the narrative of Bucky's recovery and reaffirmation of self and this was a product of that. It's a lot of headcanon and speculation as well as some integration of 616 canon. It is also an attempt at second person that is hopefully appropriate for the tone of the narrative and the implications of needing to relearn oneself (I'm still a little skeptical about the choice, but second person narratives are typically never my first choice for character study pieces)
> 
> Title taken from the John Frusciante song of the same name.

Reconnaissance was not your forte. Targets were assigned and eliminated. Understanding was secondary. Empathy was irrelevant. But this was so beyond understanding a target for means of elimination. This was you. This was a sense of self long stripped of you. This was everything that history said you were. It was so simple, so easy to find your own face staring back at you. You hoped there would be some epiphany. Some understanding that made you who they said you were. The war hero, the best friend, the loyal companion. But it never comes. No epiphany, no sudden understanding. A void in your spotted and inconstant memory. One where you think you know you should be, but are not. 

You aren’t that man (if you ever were – you’re not convinced) anymore. That man doesn’t exist anymore. If you are, even, a man at all.

You are told that to want is to be human. To feel guilt is to be human. But you are uncertain that you feel human at all. You haven’t felt human in a long time. But _he_ was human and complete. But _he_ means a lot to the world, you’re told. Maybe you know enough to know you’d rather have a legacy of heroism than the legacy of terror.

You are ephemeral by design (and, you suppose, so is time). You were not meant to be known. No one really knows who you are. Who you were. Except one. The one you’re still not sure why you didn’t let drown in the river. The one who looks at you with pain in his eyes when he thinks you’re not looking. He knew you best (him best?), the way he was, not the way you are now.

So you ask him.

And he tells you about your father.

Your father’s name was George Barnes. He was 18 when he joined the Army. He was 22 when he was shipped off to Belgium when the United States became involved in the Great War. He says your father was only a child. He said your father often said this about himself, and it was something he thought about when he too went to war. He was stationed most of his military career at Fort McCoy, close to his childhood home in Indiana. He didn’t understand what going to war meant when it happened. He thought it meant being a hero in a foreign land; thought it meant playing with toy guns, thought it was becoming brothers in arms with those who served with you. He says your father always belittled his intentions in his service, but he was an honorable man. Your father wanted to leave his mark on the world and do good. But as young man, as inexperienced with this world he found himself unprepared for the trenches and the reality of war.

He tells you about your mother.

Your mother’s name was Winifred Maes before she was Winifred Barnes. She was 19 when she met your father in Belgium. She had lived outside of Antwerp her whole life, until the Germans invaded. Until her home was taken from her. Hearing of friends and neighbors losing their lives fighting for their homes her family left Antwerp and retreated to the French border, where allied troops were rallying their strength. But through all the darkness and terror of her life during the German occupation she found one bright spot. It was a story she told her children often. The night she met their father.

He tells you’d make a face of disgust and protest whenever your mother told this story. You never liked fairy tales with happy endings, you insisted they were for girls. She said that her family had brought food and water to the men to be sent to the trenches. It was all they could do to show their support. That their father met her there and had taken her by the hand, looked into her eyes and told her that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She would tell you how hey had spent the whole night together. Talking of “what ifs” and “could wes” should the Great War not be raging around them. She said she knew then that they were meant to be together. That not even the war or her disapproving parents could keep them apart. In the few months he was in the trenches he wrote her letters of how much he missed her. How he missed her smile and her beautiful face. That it would be the only thing that kept him moving through the rain and the mud. That when the war was over, he wanted to take her home with him. He tells you, you were never sure how much of the story was true and how much of it was rose tinted retrospect. 

(You wonder if rose tinted retrospect has always been a foundation of your legacy)

She would tell you one night a runner from the allied camp came to her door, pounding frantically, insisting that she come to the field hospital. The man told her that her husband had been injured. That that night, she sat at his bed, fussing idly with the bandages that wrapped his bloody and broken knee. Trying not to look too smug or too pleased at the man laying in pain next to her. As your father explained to her that they wouldn’t let her see him unless she was his wife. He asked her without a ring, without an altar or a Chuppa like her parents had begged her. It only the two of them and the Chaplain at the hospital. And he took her home with him, just like he promised.

He tells you of your father’s knee.

Your father had been shot in the knee in Ypres, he tells you. That shot never healed correctly but he had been told it was a miracle they hadn’t had to take the leg. He says your father walked with a limp, being only a man of 30 by the time he had met him.

He tells you that your father grumbled and swore about the trouble it caused him. Less for the pain and less for the limp, but more for the aspirations it had robbed him of. He says that your father wanted nothing more than to be a hero. That he wanted to serve his country with pride and have stories of honor to tell his children. Instead he spent two months overseas before being sent home with nothing but a bullet in his knee. He said your father would say this part bitterly. But then would look to your mother, with nothing but warmth and adoration in his eyes.  
He tells you, your mother said she would never tire of seeing your father limp through the door of your family’s apartment every day. She said she thanked that bullet every day for taking your father out of the trenches and bringing him back to her.

He tells you about your name.

He says the world only ever knew you as Bucky, but it wasn’t always your name. That name came much later. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes. He tells you your mother named you that. He tells you she wanted her child to have an American name. So she named you after an American president; he laughs when he says, but not one anyone really remembers. He looks you in the eye and says that you were the one who made the name memorable.

(You’re not sure if he’s talking about the War Hero, or if he’s talking about The Asset)

Your father called you Jay and your mother called you James. But when you’d cry she would stroke your hair and call you Kapel. But he tells you that you still weren’t Bucky then.

He has to tell you about your sisters first.

There were three of them, and they called you Jamie. Judith Ann, Irene Marie and Rebecca Elisabeth.

He tells you Judith was the oldest, after you, only 14 months between you. He tells you Judith was doe eyed with a quiet smile that hid a short temper and the two of you fought over every little thing. He tells you Irene was 3 years younger than you, and Judith called her “the pretty one” with some venom. She had your father's light hair and your mothers light eyes and you’d shouted yourself hoarse at more than one boyfriend come to call on her. He tells you about Rebecca. She was 5 years younger than you, and he tells you she was your favorite. He says she looked the most like you, dark hair and light eyes like your mother, and behaved the most like you because she looked up to you. He tells you how your family would joke that they’d done so well with you they just thought they’d have another one just like you. And weren’t you two just the pair? He says Rebecca would pull a face of disgust and you’d ruffle her hair and she’d swat you on the shoulder.

He tells you of your family.

He tells you your father, after the Great War, sold crystal radios and made your family a comfortable amount of money. Your mother stayed at home with 4 children, but was a seamstress for anyone in the neighborhood who’d bring her their wash.  
He tells you it was never quiet in your home. Someone was always bickering with someone else. Someone was always coming or going. The radio was always on. He tells you, you learned to dance in your socks with your mother on the threadbare rug in the front room of your family’s cramped apartment to that radio.

He tells you how close you were to your mother. That she taught you everything she knew. She taught you to read, she taught you to write, she taught you to speak. He tells you how your mother taught you how to cook and how you were better at it than you let on in your later years. Maybe because you were embarrassed. He says he never knew why you didn’t talk about it. But he says it was the reason you two didn’t starve to death when you were on your own.

He tells you how your father taught you how to fix a radio. And how you loved to learn how things worked. And how Judith called you names because of it until the winter of ‘31, when everyone was wanting for food and warmth, when you fixed the radiator on your own.

He tells you when you got older you grew apart from your sisters; it was harder to talk to them. But you were still fiercely protective of them – like you were with him. You taught Irene and Rebecca (and him) how to play baseball in the street. Before Rebecca got teased by the neighborhood boys and was too shy to play anymore and Irene learned she liked playing the piano in Mrs. Fanning’s apartment down the hall better. When you were 14 you and Judith saved pocket change for weeks to see Frankenstein at the movie theater. And that night neither of you slept, telling each other you just weren’t tired – not that you were too scared. 

He tells you, you had a bible in the house, but you didn’t go to church on Sundays. In the spring your mother would cook a massive dinner and invite the neighborhood to eat and drink with your family. No one was ever unwelcome in your family’s home. Your family, he tells you, would have given away their last cent without a second thought.

He tells you of his family.

His father died in the Great War, and he never knew him, he says. He grew up with stories of Joseph Rogers. More rose tinted stories about the kindness and strong heartedness of his father. He says maybe he looked up to yours, because he never knew what kind of man his father would have been had he come home. But he had always hoped he’d have been like yours.  
He tells you, his mother, Sarah, had suffered so much loss in her life. Her first son, Matthew died when he was only an infant, then she lost her husband overseas before he could even meet his second son. Him. She was a nurse in the tuberculosis ward at the hospital to support the two of them. Caught between a rock and a hard place of staying home to care for a sickly child and working to make the money she needed to care for a sickly child. Her loss only made her told tighter to him. Working herself long hours to care for her troubled child who had no concept of self preservation.

He says his apartment was very quiet. He says they could never afford a radio. He shakes his head and tells you his home may have been quiet, but it wasn’t sad. It wasn’t like how he made it sound. She taught him never to be ashamed of what he stood for, to always stand up for himself. She was his moral compass before he had his own. But for all her loss, she was full of life. She taught him to cheat at cards on the boarded over bathtub in their kitchen. She encouraged his artistic tendencies. His sense of humor, as dark as it was, was hers. Even when times were tough, when money was tight, she always smiled. For a long time, he tells you, that his mother was all he had. But that was before you.

He tells you about how you met.

He tells you he’s always been reckless, maybe a little aggressive. It’s something the history books get wrong about him, or choose to leave out. But he thinks they’re talking about Captain America, not him. (You understand that he knows what it’s like to be two different people, like you know that you are.)

He tells you he was small, and had too much fight in him. He’d push and shove and shout at anyone who looked at him the wrong way. Anyone who looked at anyone the wrong way. He says he would fights that weren’t his to fight. He says he still does it now, but people listen to him now. It’s harder to knock him in the dirt now. 

He keeps getting distracted.

He tells you he’d been shoved into some trash cans out in the alleyway. You’d been sitting on the fire escape when you heard the racket.. You were 8. He was 7. He says some of the neighborhood boys had been throwing stones at one of the stray cats that often loitered around your neighborhood’s trash cans looking for scraps and he’d thrown a limp punch at one of them.

He says you hopped off the ladder to the fire escape, grabbed the other boy by the shoulders and kicked him square in the pants. Knocked him flat on his face. The other boy scrambled to his feet and ran out of the alley, while you called after him to ‘buzz off if he knew what was good for him’.

He tells you, you sat right in the pile of upturned garbage cans and trash from the apartments on your block with him. You put his face in your hands and inspected the black eye that was starting to bloom on his pale skin. Says you told him you had a sister who wailed on you when she didn’t get her way so you knew all about bruises. (He says you always said Judith was mean and scary when you were kids, but he never saw her lay a finger to you or shout at you when you didn’t have it coming.) He tells you how, more than anything, it was his pride that was injured when he shoved at your shoulders and wiped his bleeding nose on his shirt, muttering into his wrist how he didn’t need any help.

He tells you how you punched him in the shoulder and scowled at him. How you told him; "You’re sitting in garbage with blood all over your face after getting knocked a good one, I think you could use a hand more than you think."

He tells you, you ushered him up the fire escape and into your apartment to have your mother clean him up.

You told him as they climbed slowly up the ladder that your name was James. He told you his name was Steve. You told him not to pick on kids bigger than him unless he had someone to get his back. He asked you if he knew anyone who’d want to side with someone like him.

He tells you, you told him that you would.

He tells you how you became Bucky.

He says you were 10 years old and he had officially become an unofficial member of the Barnes household. With his mother working during the day and Winifred being unable to stomach the thought of him being home alone she insisted that you bring him home with you after the school, until his mother could return home. You were 10 years old and Rebecca was just turning 5. Your father’s family had taken the train from Indiana to meet her for the first time on that particular birthday and you had been instructed to be on your best behavior.

He tells you, you were sitting on the floor in your room with him (you had your own room and the girls had to share – something you lorded over them in your younger years) having dragged the radio into your room to listen to the baseball game. Judith pounded on the door, telling you you were being rude and your father wanted you to come out. You shouted at her to ‘dry up’.  
He tells you that he had never seen your mother be anything but welcoming and kind until that moment. When she stormed into your room, grabbed you by the collar and barked your full name as she gave you a stern talking to about your language.

He tells you, for one reason or another, he’d never heard your full name before that moment. He said he laughed so hard he started wheezing. He says you looked sullen when you punched him in the shoulder and told him to stop laughing. He says he kept his giggles to a minimum long enough to choke out a ‘Buchanan’ and dissolved into fits of laughter again.

He says you sulked about it for weeks. He wouldn’t stop calling you by your middle name. You’d never been embarrassed by it before, he tells you. Maybe it was because he couldn’t say it without giggling. He says you tried calling him by his, but it just didn’t have the same effect. There was no real malice in it, there was nothing really funny about it. Eventually you stopped trying to make him stop. Eventually Buchanan became Bucky. And eventually, he tells you, you both forgot that he’d been being mean when he gave you that name.

He tells you how you grew up.

He tells you how you thought you were invincible, and how he kept trying to prove that he was too. You’d dive straight into the river; he said he’d hesitate because he wasn’t a great swimmer. You’d run off the trails to climb the tallest trees in Prospect Park, he said he’d wait for you on the lowest branches, completely out of breath. You’d jump over the turnstiles at Coney Island in the summer. He said the two of you got caught once. You took the fall, like you always did. Even when it had been entirely his idea. You’d throw rocks over the fence to break windows in the abandoned buildings on 39th Street. You’d crow with laughter as each rock went crashing through the glass. You’d clap him on the shoulder every time his rock fell with a dull thud in the yard, a couple meters short of the windows he was aiming for.

You were the same height for much of your childhood, he tells you. But one summer you outgrew him by 5 inches seemingly overnight and he quietly resented you for that. That was the summer girls started talking to you. You were nervous and shy the first time it happened. You were uncertain what was expected of you or what you should say. But, he tells you that you learned that you didn’t have to say much of anything. That the girls fell at your feet no matter what you did. He says he quietly resented you for that too.

But you never left him behind, he tells you. You were popular. Did well in school. Everyone on the block knew Bucky Barnes for one reputation or another. He says everyone knew him by association. Usually with a perplexed quirk in their voice that seemed to ask ‘what’s a good kid like that sticking around a bad egg like him?’.

He says he made nothing but trouble for you.

He says, somehow, you always got pegged for the trouble-maker, especially after the both of you were considered dead and gone. That you, with your good looks, your crooked smile and way with women, were the one getting Captain America into trouble. He tells you, history books got a lot of the two of you wrong.

He tells you even before Captain America, he was getting you into trouble. You just didn’t have the good sense of leave him be. All the fights, the bleeding knuckles, the black eyes and busted noses. You never started them, but you always finished them. It was like you had some 6th sense of when he was getting in trouble. You were always there to help in any way you could. That didn’t mean you didn’t tell him to cut it out. Didn’t mean you’d sit in silence to validate his self-destructive tendencies.

He tells you, when you were young, you silently took care of him, but as you got older, it got harder and harder for you to stay silent. You’d, rightly so, suggest maybe not approach the man hassling the ticket girl at the theater. He did, he got a hell of a shiner for his trouble. Or to stop lying on enlistment forms. He didn’t, he joined the army. He’d tried to stay understanding to your position (‘to your nagging’ he calls it first, but he corrects himself), he tells you. But you were the one person on earth he could say ‘no’ to without getting clocked in the face.

He exercised that facet of your relationship on a regular basis, he tells you.

History wanted to say you were brothers in arms, unquestioning and defensive of every choice the other made, he says. He almost laughs aloud. If only they knew how often the two of you fought, he says.

He tells you about a time when you were older, living in his ma’s old place, he’d come home, broken knuckles and a split lip acting like not a thing was wrong and you’d been so mad you smashed a plate over the kitchen table yelling at him that enough was a enough. You were so cross with him you slept on the fire escape that night because you couldn’t stand watching him wince his way around the apartment without getting riled up again. He tells you, he’d left you breakfast on the window ledge to the fire escape by way of apology.

He tells you about a time when you were much younger, you took out Hazel Allen and kissed her on the mouth and bragged to anyone who’d listen when you’d known he was sweet on her and he didn’t speak to you for a whole month. He says he broke his silence when Hazel ended up telling her girlfriends you were a lousy kisser and there wasn’t a girl in your class who didn’t hear that rumor, so you came shuffling back apologizing.

He tells you about one time when you were 13, he was 12, the two of you’d gotten in a scuffle. Something adolescent fueled over nothing, and you’d swung at him, square in the face. Broke his nose. Blood was everywhere and he couldn’t see straight, he tells you. He tells you, instantly, you dropped to your knees to make sure he was okay. He says he could hardly laugh through all the blood in his mouth. Never seemed the two of you could ever stay mad at each other, he tells you.

He tells you how much he hated himself then. His skinny body liable to kill him any time the weather dropped below 40 degrees. His sickly body met with disdain and pity by both men and women alike. You, tall and handsome and respected. He tells you how much he resented you. How he never told you about it, but how he thinks you probably knew. The resentment and self loathing fueled a lot of fights with strangers, but more than anything, he tells you, it fueled fights with you. Usually petty squabbling like when you were kids. You’d tell him to calm down and he’d babble angrily at you, hoping you’d fight back. You never hit him again, he tells you, after the time you broke his nose. He also tells you, sometimes he wish that you would have. Hit him, that is. But you’d always managed to shut him right up. He tells you, you had his number.

He said it only got worse as the two of you got older.

You knew that he was an artist. You knew how deeply he cared about things. About how emotional he could get. How he never spoke of it outside of the privacy of your respective apartments. To be those things and small and skinny on top of it, he chuckles to himself, no one took him seriously to begin with. People already thought he was effete and worthless, he tells you with a shrug. He wasn’t about to give anyone reason to keep saying it about him.

The fighting and the righteous indignation wasn’t an act though – not really, he says. But he let a lot of things that were important to him fall by the wayside because he so desperately wanted to be seen as your equal. He tells you he looked to you to understand what kind of man to be. He knew who he was, but he never felt that he was the kind of man the rest of the world expected him to be. But you, you were adored and lauded and confident and successful, and so many things that he was not. He just wanted to be your equal.

He tells you he’d been jealous. He was tired of wishing to be someone else. Of wishing to be you. That some days, the darker days, he wanted to beat you, crack you across the jaw and knock you down a peg. That if he proved to himself that he was better, that he was the bigger man, the feeling of inadequacy would go away. But he didn’t want to hurt you, he says, he could never hurt you.

(He says he never told you any of this before now, he says he never had the nerve before then. He says he was afraid maybe you’d laugh at him, or worse, feel sorry for him.)

Not that you ever thought he was less than you. He says that’s what he loved best about you. You notice his eyes lower when he says ‘loved’ and you blink slowly, uncertain how to interpret that cue. That you never cared that he was small and skinny. That you didn’t coddle him or treat him like he was liable to drop dead from an unexpected strong breeze. You knew why he was how he was, and you knew how much of it was tied into a poor self image. You berated him while simultaneously being supportive. You were what he needed when he’d lost everything.

He tells you about the day his mother died.

Sarah worked in that tuberculosis ward his whole life, he tells you. He says because of how catching it was it paid a little better than most of the other positions at the hospital. They needed the money with the medical bills he’d accumulated in his lifetime and with the market crash breathing down everyone’s necks she didn't feel she had much of a choice. No one was living as comfortably has they had been a decade before.

He said she’d taken care her whole life not to bring any sickness home with her to her frail son. 

His safety and wellbeing was really the only thing she ever cared about.

He says he hardly knew she was sick. She never told him, not directly anyway. He could see her wasting away. He could see how tired her eyes were. He could hear her coughing through the walls of their apartment. But to speak of it to each other would make it real. So they never did.

He says he did everything he could to bring more money into the house hoping she’d take it to care for herself. He says he delivered papers, groceries, any job that would have him. Which wasn’t many, he says. When everyone was vying for the handful of jobs there were to give, few were willing to give away that work to someone who was an infirm. He says he’d come home with a few crumpled bills and a handful of change and press it into her hand. She’d pat his hand, her eyes soft and sad, and tell him he’d earned it, it was his.

He couldn’t insist to her that she take it, that she take it and get help. It’d make it real.

And then she was gone.

He says they buried her next to his father and brother. In the plot he always suspected would belong to him, leaving her alone, one day.

He tells you how you were there that day. That you’d caught up to him returning to his now empty apartment. You told him that his parents had wanted to take him to the cemetery but didn’t know how to ask. There was no real funeral, no wake or gathering of people. He hadn’t had the money, he’d only had enough to put her to rest with his family. He says you’d offered to let him live with your family. He says you’d said it like you were kids and you were asking him to stay over for the weekend. That the implications of what you’d asked him would fall by the wayside.

Everyone was hurting for money, even your family who’d always had more than his. And you were there, standing on his stairs, asking him to stay with you. That your family didn’t expect any reimbursement. Didn’t expect any contribution or assistance from him. You’d made a joke, he tells you, that you could take out the trash and shine your shoes. Like it was enough to repay the generosity you were laying at his feet. Your home was feeding and sheltering 4 children as it was. Though he never knew for sure, there was no way that your family wasn’t already living at the edge of their means. He says your family had cared for him most of his childhood. With his mother working the long hours she did, and when he was a child he couldn’t say no. He didn’t feel the burden that he felt now, the need to repay them for everything they’d done for him over the years. He says he couldn’t accept your family’s generosity. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was the guilt he’d felt for burdening your family for all those years. He couldn’t ask it of them again.  
That was when, he says, you told him he didn’t have to go through this alone. That was when, he said, he realized you weren’t asking out of pity or out of obligation. That you weren’t implying that he couldn’t care for himself and needed to be supervised. You weren’t belittling, you weren’t demeaning, you weren’t babying. You just didn’t want him to be alone.

Alone wasn’t a reality he’d fully come to terms with, he tells you. It was a pill he wasn’t ready to swallow. You were all he had left.

He had nothing, but he had you.

He had you when you moved into his mother’s apartment with him. He wouldn’t budge, he couldn’t budge. He couldn’t ask for your family to care for him like that. He’d wanted so badly to be seen as self sufficient. He wanted to carry on without his mother who had done so much for him. He didn’t want to fall into leaning on someone else in her place. 

You could have moved into another apartment, but he couldn’t, he tells you. He, even then, thought it was a little morbid, living in the apartment his mother died in. But it was also the only home he’d ever known, he tells you. He wasn’t ready for a new chapter in his life. Not with his mother’s passing still so fresh in his mind. So you moved into his old room. Which was less a room than it was a curtain drawn across the far end of the sitting room, and he into his mother’s. He tells you it was like having her close, even though she was gone. But as months went on it stopped feeling like his mother’s house, and more like your home. The two of you, together.

Despite the basic fact that you were bringing most of the money into your apartment he insisted that your financial responsibilities be split evenly. You didn’t fight him about it, you knew it was important to him to contribute. But sometimes it meant one of you would forget to pay for power that month. It wasn’t that you weren’t making ends meet. Even with the market on the rise it was hard for him to keep a job pinned down. Not when his lungs were weak and rattled when it got too cold and kept him holed up in bed for weeks at a time. The two of you just weren’t the best at being independent – your newfound sense of responsibility was unfamiliar. And you were young. You’d just laugh it off. Food would go bad before you could eat it? Laughed it off (and usually ate it anyway). Missing a day of work because you were sleeping off a hangover? Laughed it off (and got a chewing out by the foreman the next day). Cut things a little close on the rent because you had insisted they go out dancing. Laughed it off (he tells you, despite the sour mood he usually was in on those dates).

It wasn’t like you didn’t live in each other’s pockets from the very moment you met. But he tells you there were parts of you he didn’t know until you lived together. He tells you how you used to talk in your sleep. How when your mother would come by to bring you dinner (Because she insisted the two of you couldn’t feed yourselves. Which wasn’t too far from the truth.) she’d pester you about settling down and getting married and you’d hash out the same argument in your doorway. You would hum to yourself while your mind would wander. You always kept the radio on. You talked to yourself. You were noisy, he tells you. 

(You know he tells you this, because you aren’t anymore.) 

He tells you how you’d reenact the Dick Tracy comics for him out of the New York News while he drew. Which was more distracting and embarrassing to watch than it was charming. (“Please don’t go into radio, Buck.” A voice in your head fills in.) How on more than one occasion you’d begged on your knees for him to go out with you, dates or not. How you’d bicker about leaving laundry out on the fire escape when it would go missing. How in the winter you couldn’t always afford to keep the heat on and the two of you would burn old newspapers in the stove and would sleep on the kitchen floor next to it. Blankets and chair cushions piled up, just like when you were kids.

He tells you how seeing you every morning - be it face down on your small dining table nursing a hangover or your back as it slid out the door for whatever job you had that month - made all the scraping money together tolerable. The weekends spent hoping your folks would invite you two for dinner since you didn’t have the money for it yourself that week, it was all worthwhile. But it was somewhat short lived, he says.

He tells you about your conscription.

You had grown up with your father’s stories of the war, and his lamentation that he hadn’t done enough for the effort. You’d grown up with a sense of responsibility tied very closely to military service, he tells you. Your father had often told you that he hoped, one day, you’d enlist. You said wanted your father to have some closure, and you wanted to make him proud. But what you never said out loud, he tells you, you never would have enlisted. He tells you, you never told him so. It was something he’d put together when you were finally reunited in the war. You wanted to make him proud (you don’t know if he means him, or your father), but you were afraid.

But you didn’t have a choice.

He tells you in the fall of 1940 you got a letter telling you you’d been conscripted. The peace-time draft fully in effect. Your mother cried quiet tears for you, worried about her boy should the States go to war. Your parents had seen war first hand, and made the best of it against all odds. Everyone quietly hoped maybe the Barnes family had a lot of good luck. But you said no ill words about being shipped up north to Fort Drum. He tells you, you told him you’d enlisted on your own. That it was time you do something with your life. 

You lied.

You kissed your mother and sisters goodbye that morning at the station to take you to Basic. Your mother had her arms around Rebecca, who was shaking with tears she had been trying to stifle for the better part of the morning. You told her it was just training, that you’d come home in a few months. The war was far away and there was nothing for her to be crying about. Judith pinched your arm, gave you a sad smile, and patted your cheek. Irene hugged you close and made you promise no less than 12 times that you would write. You shook your father’s hand with all your few belongings in a bag over your shoulder. Then, he tells you, you went to him.

He tells you about the bitterness and jealousy that was settling in his gut. He was realizing that he’d spent so much time emulating you, and you were finally doing something he just couldn't. He chuckles bitterly, you understand enough to not ask why. He says wanted to go too, not because of you, but because he had something to prove. Something, he says, he would have denied until the day he died. He says he grit his teeth and swallowed his pride when he offered you his hand to shake. He tells you laughed at him and pulled him close to your chest. Resting your chin on his head like you had a thousand times before in your quieter moments. He says you told him to watch out for your girls (he clarifies, you had meant your mother and sisters), and not to start anything he couldn’t finish without you.

He tells you, you said something else. But your lips were pressed to his hair, and even 80 years later, he didn’t know what that was.

But, he says, he always hoped.

He tells you while you were gone not much changed. He couldn’t tell you about your training (your first training, your non-remembered but fundamental training, you remind yourself), he could only tell you about what you’d left behind.

He tells you how much he missed having you around. How he realized he had prolonged the inevitable and was finally alone. He tells you how he’d always been close to your family. He practically grew up a Barnes. But after you were gone away, he tells you, he decided to make his presence scarce in their lives. He shrugs and tells you he doesn’t know why he thought that would work. He says, he thought maybe that now that you were gone they’d have no reason to keep up on lifelong misfit Steve Rogers. That maybe the only reason your family had cared about him in the first place was because of you.

He laughs. And tells you how stupid he was.

He tells you how your mother would invite him to dinner every Saturday. And how every Saturday, he’d decline, perpetually feeling like a burden on your family. He tells how you she never insisted, perhaps because she knew him like she knew her own son, but always asked. He tells you how even after months of declining her offer, eventually Winifred would send one of your sisters, usually Rebecca, to your apartment with a plate and instructions not to leave until he’d cleared his plate.

He tells you how he enjoyed Rebecca’s company during those months you were at basic. Some evenings she’d bring her school work and scribble away at your small dining table. Sometimes she’d bring a book she thought he’d enjoy to leave behind. Some evenings she brought nothing at all, and sat at the table with him while he ate, chatting idly.

He tells you how even though it made Rebecca roll her eyes and you protest loudly, the two of you really were quite the pair. He tells you how having her around made him miss you less. The two of you had the same laugh, she was noisy in the same ways you were. He tells you he missed that most in the apartment while you were gone.

Not that you didn’t keep in touch.

He tells you about the letters but more importantly, what was in them.

He tells you, at first, you would send a good portion of your salary in an envelope, directly to him. He tells you, you weren’t trying to be demeaning, you just knew how hard it was for him to hold down a job. You’d always said (in your chicken scratch handwriting, he adds - a detail you are sure is irrelevant) that it was still half your place too and if you wanted a bed to come home to you were going to have to chip in. He tells you, like everything, he couldn’t accept it. And with each returning letter, he’d send the folded up bills back to you.

He tells you, never let it be said that you aren’t (weren’t?) just as stubborn as he was. Because that first month’s salary was mailed between the two of you for the entire following month. Then one day, he says, the only thing in the envelope from you was a letter. No mention of the money, no insisting he take it, nothing. Though, he tells you, after Rebecca came with a plate of stew and a book she’d just finished to lend him and he sat to open the book, a few loose crumpled bills fell into his lap. He tells you, it became something of a game. How could you get your sisters to sneak your salary money into the apartment for him. Eventually, he tells you, he stopped resisting (which had a lot to do with falling ill that winter and losing his job with the grocer) did he swallow his pride and accept your help but allowed the game to continue.

That spring you were given leave and returned home; Private First Class James Barnes. He tells you he’d never seen your father smile like the day you came home with that chevron on your sleeve. Your mother ran her hands through your hair, shorter than it had been when you left and told you how handsome you looked. You’d always been good looking, he tells you with color rising in his cheeks, but the dress uniform they’d sent you home in certainly reminded everyone on the block.

He tells you took him on a double date that night, out dancing. Which ended like it always did: your date head over heels for you, his date sitting silently waiting to be taken home. He tells you how the two of you crashed in the door of your apartment in the wee hours of the morning, maybe a little more intoxicated than you’d intended. How you took his face in your hands looked him straight in the eye and said ‘promise me you’ll never join the army, Stevie’ before clapping him on the shoulder as though you’d just wished him goodnight and collapsing into your bed.

You never said anything about it the next morning, he tells you.

But then you were gone again. Leave was over, and he was alone again. For a whole year it was this way, he tells you. You’d send your sisters your salary to sneak into the apartment. You’d come home for leave with a new chevron on your sleeve. You’d take him out dancing, you’d take him back to your mother’s house for dinner. He tells you, every time you came home, he was worried things would change. That you’d out grow him or that the army would show you the kind of men you could keep your company with. Not skinny back alley brawlers who would never amount to anything. But real men, who could do something with their lives.

But you were always smiling when you got off the train. Always smiling for him when you’d throw your duffle in the doorway of the apartment. Where later, he says, he’d trip over it, and you’d fight about leaving a mess.

He tells you about the winter of 1941.

You were on leave the first two weeks of December. Your mother had insisted you stay in your family’s home as you’d missed Irene’s birthday the year before and it was important to her you be around for it that year. He tells you, it was just after lunch when everyone got the news. It spread like wildfire. It didn’t matter if you were near a radio when the news came, everyone heard, one way or another.

He tells you how he was laid up sick in bed with the flu that Sunday. How you’d left him to sleep it off to spend the afternoon at home. He tells you, he’d had to insist. He tells you how you wouldn’t leave his side when he got sick, even if it was just the sniffles. He tells you every winter the doctor would suggest it might be his last. He tells you, he thinks he made it through those winters purely out of spite. 

He tells you, he never knew what happened in the Barnes home that Sunday afternoon. You never said a thing about it. You came home that night and asked if he’d heard. He tells you, he did, there was no way not to, but that was all you’d said.

Lines at the recruitment centers were out the door, around the block, he tells you. Men standing in the cold for hours to enlist. He tells you how he was kicking himself because he could hardly pull himself out of bed. Let alone stand out in the cold. You were back to Fort Drum that very next day. You didn’t say much when you left, though, he tells you, he didn’t either. He tells you he didn’t know what to say. That he was jealous? That he was afraid you’d never come back? That he wanted to go with you? He tells you, he knew you’d be furious if he said any of it to you. So he didn’t say anything at all.

He tells you about your orders.

It was some miracle you didn’t get orders then and there, he tells you. You stayed stationed at Fort Drum for 2 years, training for something. Your letters never really could say what. Your letters were full of black from the censors – both for content and profanity, he expected - now that the States was at war. Until the summer of 1943 when you came home. 

He says you were given another chevron, Sergeant James Barnes now, and your orders.

You had one day.

One day to say your goodbyes. You’d tried to make it a typical day, he tells you. You’d tried to keep your mind off of where you’d be going, and what could happen to you. You didn’t want any crying or well wishes or words of warning.

He tells you you’d promised to meet him at the theater for a matinee, you were late and you only found him getting the snot kicked out of him in an alley. He tells you, any other day you’d have been upset with him. Groaned his name as you picked him out of the dirt and asked a lot of questions. Most of which were just ‘Why this time, Steve?’ in disguise.

But you didn’t this time, he tells you.

He tells you, this time, you just laughed at him as you picked him up out of the upturned garbage can. (It was the last fight you broke up on his behalf, and he was sitting in the garbage. Just like the first fight you broke up. He tells you, he thinks about that a lot.). He tells you how you took out this girl you’d taken out on your last leave and her friend. How you’d taken them all to the World’s Fair like you’d always wanted to but never had the money for.

He tells you how he messed it all up.

He couldn’t get his mind off of it, he tells you. He’d been to 5 different recruitment centers while you were gone. Lied 5 times to the U.S. Government so he could feel like he was doing something meaningful with his life. And you knew. He tells you, you knew. Even before you saw the 4F slip in his hand stating he was from Paramus that afternoon. You’d seen the 4F’s before it laying on your kitchen table before he’d hastily try to hide them in a book. You knew because you knew how he was, and how much it meant to him. Even if you’d told him time and time again to keep himself safe and out of the army, it didn’t matter. And he tells you, you knew there wasn’t a single thing you could say to stop him, but you always tried. Like always, you were just trying to keep him safe. 

He says it was your last night and he knew he should spend it with you. But he went to that recruitment center without saying a word to his date, or to you. You found him quickly enough, he tells you. It wasn’t like it was much of a mystery. He says, it was good you’d wanted to keep your last night stateside like any other because you fought, openly and loudly, on the front steps of the recruitment center.

He tells you, it was easier, in some ways to see you go that night. He was used to you coming home for a few days or a few weeks, only to be gone again for months at a time. It wasn’t the first time you’d had to say goodbye, and it had been getting easier. Maybe, he says (more to himself than you) that he was trying to fool himself, thinking that this goodbye was like the ones before. 

He called you a jerk that night. His tone, he says, was in jest, but he couldn’t help but feel bitter and frustrated with you because you wouldn’t listen to him. But, he tells you, as he watched your back retreat down the stairs he thought, you were a lot of things. But none of them were all the things he wanted to call you in that moment. You were afraid to go to a war you never wanted to be a part of. No one would have blamed you for that had you ever said it aloud. But you went anyway, jaw set and back straight, that crooked smile on your face. 

He tells you how you came home alone to the apartment that night. He tells you how he pretended to be asleep in bed. How he screwed his eyes shut afraid to say goodbye to you for real. He tells you how you walked over to his bed, and pressed your lips to his hair. Like you’d done when you left for boot camp, how you mumbled into his hair. How you’d said “Please don’t follow me, Stevie.”. How you’d raked your fingers through his hair gently, smoothing the mess you’d made.

How you said into the dark, “I couldn’t live without you.”

He doesn’t tell you about Doctor Erskine.

He doesn’t tell you about SSR.

He doesn’t tell you about boot camp.

(You know about these things from the museum. The museum full of words that someone wanted you to know about Captain America. Half truths and propaganda. Things of legend faded and warped by time. You know about these things because everyone knows these things. These things are part of the same legend you are. )

(Were?)

He tells you about Azzano.

He tells you how he really wasn’t supposed to be there, not in any official capacity. How he hadn’t the faintest idea that it was your unit who’s encampment he and the USO girls had been crashing. But it all came to light all at once. How he was how you see him now, with a body that could keep up with him. He still, true to the Steve Rogers you knew before the war, without a second thought or hesitation went after you.

He tells you he was different without you. You’d tell him when to stop, when to think, when to calm down. And maybe he didn’t listen to you every time (or very much at all, he chuckles), at least he heard you. But he was without you now. These new people in his life were important, fiercely supportive like you were (he doesn’t tell you their names, but you don’t ask for them). They would have suffered bloody knuckles and broken noses for him, just like you.

But they weren’t you.

They believed in him like you did, he says. But there was that shine of Captain America on him now, which would color the way everyone treated him. He said he was learning people believed in Captain America like they didn’t believe in Steve Rogers. But, that boldness, that risk, that drive that was Captain America? It had been Steve Rogers for much longer.

He tells you, as an aside, it was refreshing. To not be told he couldn’t do something. To have people support his recklessness. He took advantage of it, he saw this new light people saw him in as a gift, that he could act as he had always wanted. Perhaps now without consequence.  
He tells you, when he found you, he was certain you’d be dead, and that shortly, he would be too. The army certainly believed you dead. Your family received a letter of condolence two weeks later. Two weeks after that, they would receive another letter, a redaction. Sergeant James Barnes found alive and well. Offered an honorable discharge, but chose to remain enlisted to serve God and country.

(Some months later, he tells you, they would receive yet another letter of condolence.)

(But a second redaction never came.)

He tells you, you were restrained at your wrists and forearms (something you remember, but more recently) and you were hardly lucid. You couldn’t even recite your whole service number. But he tells you, he’ll never forget as long as he lives the way your face had changed. Less that you looked gaunt and tired. How the lines of your face had gone harsh. How you looked how he imagined a corpse would look, had he ever really seen one. But more the way that there was nothing behind your eyes until you looked at him. Looked at him like he had hung the sun and the moon and the stars.

He tells you how you were in a dank basement room. A room that smelled of decay, surrounded by machines and instruments dark with blood, and you were smiling at him. He tells you, if you were to have asked him to stay there in that room in that moment that he would have welcomed that collapsing building down on top of him.

He asks you if you remember that day.

You shake your head.

He looks disappointed.

He tells you, after Azzano, you were different.

He tells you, you were different but he ignored it. He tells you, you didn’t sleep at night. That you paced in the barracks when you thought he wouldn’t notice. You didn’t smile anymore. Instead it was some monstrous facsimile of a smile, pulling at the corners of your mouth. And he ignored it. He tells you he should have known what war would do to you, what you had endured would do to you. What it would have done to anyone.

He tells you he wanted to believe that going to war was going to be everything he had hoped it would be. Brothers in arms, he was there with you, changing the world, saving the world. You were heroes, kids stateside knew your names, from comic books and news reels. Maybe it was denial or maybe he was deluded, he says. But he spent a lot of those first months as the commanding officer of SSR Strike Team Alpha, “the Howling Commandos”, refusing to see the reality of your circumstances because he was selfish. This was what he wanted, he was fulfilled and being that change in the world he always wished he could be. Finally, he says looking sheepish, he had the body to back up his ambition. He let it go to his head for a while, he says. 

He’s not proud, he says.

He tells you, people got stupid about Captain America. He says not under any other circumstances would the US Army ever promote some green USO performer who’d never seen a day of live combat to Captain on the basis of being a military experiment and dumb luck. But Captain America was a symbol, he was a part of the war effort. It only made sense. It only so happened that as a unit, the Commandos were effective. He says you developed a twitch in your jaw from clenching your teeth trying not to scream at him on a nightly basis. Be it after jumping in front of tanks our out of windows of exploding buildings. The Commandos, he says, were more of a less a fraternity of reckless, though admittedly effective, children. And you were left tearing your hair out just trying to keep him safe.

He tells you, he’d have been dead a in a day without you as his NCO.

He tells you, one night Morita let slip that you had been given discharge on the grounds of psychological injury. And that you had turned it down.

He tells you after that, he couldn’t ignore how different you were. 

He couldn’t ignore it, but he couldn’t talk about it. He says, he didn’t think you’d want to talk about it even if he had the words.

He couldn’t ignore how you didn’t joke like you used to, how your interactions with the rest of the commandos were terse and short. How ruthless you’d become. How it seemed you’d retreated into your own mind and the brief moments of levity the war allowed them were like motions you were going through without understanding their meaning. Like you were hardly there anymore. You existed on the fringe of the camaraderie of the commandos, like he’d seen you at the bar.  
The war asked horrific things of you and the rest of the commandos, he tells you, (you remember horrific things, but you’re certain they are not the events he speaks of) there was no two ways about it. But you, he tells you, seemed hell bent on keeping his hands clean with no regard for your own. You became a series of extremes. Silence and inaction. Screams and violence.

He tells you he’d watched you stare down the scope of your rifle for hours, unblinking, unmoving. He tells you he watched you pull a knife from your boot, and without a word, slit the throat of a German scout after Gabe had told them he was refusing to cooperate. He tells you how you wouldn’t speak for hours after a mission, cleaning and reassembling your rifle in silence. He tells you how you’d shout yourself hoarse, insisting you take point on missions that were assassination colored.

He tells you, he didn’t want to worry about you because you didn’t want to be worried about. But what else was he to do?

He tells you of one instance, where they had been sent to clear the wreckage of a HYDRA base. (you feel your spine coil uncomfortably) After air support had reduced it to crumbling stone and mangled rebar, you and Dernier had established a perimeter, and he and the rest had walked into the smoking ruins without expectations of finding survivors. They’d done this before, he tells you, they never found survivors, but it wasn’t survivors they were looking for.

He tells you it happened so fast, he only heard the distant crack of gunfire and saw the HYDRA agent crumple to the ground. He says he saw you shift as you reloaded your rifle from your vantage point, your face unmoving and unphased as you did, knowing what you must have done. It wasn’t the first time you’d saved his life, nor would it be the last, but what struck him about this instance, he tells you, is how closely he saw the man you had shot down.

Despite the helmet and goggles that the HYDRA agents wore at the time, there, between his eyes, the cracks in his goggles spider-webbing out from the unmistakable entry wound there. Blood pooling up under his head where he’d fallen, viscera and blood splattering the collapsed concrete surrounding them.

He sighs when he tells you, this wasn’t the first time he’d seen you kill a man, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen death at war. Despite your best efforts, he tells you, his hands weren’t clean either. But there was something so intimate about this instance that it haunted him for days. What was even more haunting, he tells you, was how you made no mention of it.

He tells you about the day you died. 

(The first time, you remind yourself, perhaps the most permanent time. Not the thousands of sisyphean deaths you know have cursed you.)

You notice, the words come less freely now. Perhaps, you wonder, if this memory is painful though you don’t understand the sensation. 

He says, despite it all, what he remembers most about that day was that you had laughed. That despite the electric and frenetic sense of anxiety that vibrated off of the six of you, despite the risk and the uncertainty, you had laughed. He said, as you stood at the precipice of uncertainty staring down into a void that most assuredly spelled certain death (You remember this as well, but more recently. You remember the river.) and you’d asked if this was personal. If this was payback for some long forgotten indiscretion in your youth, and you smiled. He said it had been weeks, months, since he had seen you smile - a smile that wasn’t an overcorrected grimace - and here you were, on the literal cliff’s edge laughing about some half remembered youthful show of machismo ready to throw yourself into the eye of the storm like it wasn’t any different. 

The rest, he says, happened quickly. Everyone performed as they were expected, the mission parameters were clear but the uncontrollable falling dominos of unfortunate circumstance threw you from that train all the same. He says he’d reached for you but it wasn’t enough, how for months he could hear your scream in every waking sound. He says, you do not live as long as he (“we” goes unsaid) has and live without regret and despite all of his great and plentiful lifetime of mistakes and regrets taking your hand was the singular thing that kept him awake at night. 

He tells you he thought, maybe after that, he hoped he would die too. That losing you was a grief so unspeakable he never truly found a way to rid himself of it. He says that he tempted fate to strike him dead but not even a plane crashed into the depths of the ocean could destroy Captain America, apparently. That was, as he said, was that. 

He tells you he visited your sister after he after his own death and rebirth. He says he wasn’t sure why he would do that to himself, the modern century was still so new and unfamiliar and he wondered if some familiarity might ease the transition. He says he probably left the ice with his propensity for self inflicted suffering fully intact. He tells you he never saw Rebecca, not really. He tells you he met her grandson in her stead, Rebecca too ill and too far on in years to really know him anymore. 

His name is Scott, he tells you, and you aren’t interested. 

He says they never found your body. (“your body” strikes you as an alien concept) He says he was never sure if your family ever found closure.

You do not tell him you remember the snow.

You do not tell him you remember the blood.

You do not tell him he remember your hand. Before and after it belonged to your body. 

You do not tell him you remember the cold. 

He doesn’t say anything to you for a moment. You say nothing. You can’t help but suspect that information is being withheld. You’ve seen his face on the face of missions before him. The moment of uncertainty where those being coerced are weighing the benefits of acquiescing to their interrogators. Weighing how much more pain and suffering they can endure to keep their silence. You know this, because you have inflicted this kind pain on many before him. But this time, you didn’t know this would cause your subject pain. It wasn’t the purpose of this interrogation. You want him to explain why he is in pain, but you can’t ask, because you don’t know how to ask.

Then he tells you he’s always loved you in one way or another.

But he never told you. He tells you he was afraid of what you might think of him. Of what you might do if he told you, what would become of the two of you if you rejected him. But he tells you, more than anything, he was afraid you’d love him back. And then what would happen to you? The time you came from, the time you were meant to live and die in was unkind to those kinds feelings. And so he never told you. He tells you, he doesn’t know how much good it does to tell you now. If that means anything to you now. He tells you he doesn’t expect you to be that man anymore. You know he’s reciting words that have been impressed on him by others. 

Because he tells you – and you hear weakness in his voice this time - he wants you to be that man. More than anything. But he also tells you that he knows telling you this is selfish and mean spirited because it’s not his choice to make. The man you become. It’s not for him to influence. You can’t control what comes back to you and what’s lost forever in the fog of the memories that were burned out of you.

There is a wringing in your gut that feels unfamiliar. A desire to please that is well beyond the baser instinct of completing a mission without incident.

Wanting is still unfamiliar.


End file.
